Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Return to sender

Spent the weekend in Fayetteville, North Carolina working on draft 2 of the Black Powder | Red Earth screenplay. I've been to Fayetteville 3 times now. To say that it is an alien place to me is an understatement. I've been to places where there are no roads and no one speaks English that are less foreign to me, which is a bit ironic considering how much I am interested in some of the units based there.

People range from good to surreal. But I imagine I come off just the same ^_^;

I picked up a MAV and some new speed load mag pouches from Eagle. If I ever have 5 minutes again maybe I will check them out. I was hoping to do a pistol course this year, but my schedule is so maxed out, I am pretty much limiting myself to things that are directly related to projects I am actively working on right now, aka I re-read "Broken Angels" by Richard K Morgan on the flight because it is the most bad ass scifi/mercenary story ever written. Takeshi Kovacs is probably my favorite character in modern science fiction followed closely(and maybe surpassed by) Neal Asher's Ian Cormac. Both are ruthles killers. One works for himself and the other for AI masters. Both kill people a plenty :)

I received a copy of the Akira 2019 Mechanix book from my amigo, Takafumi Matsubara today. I can't wait to soak it up. I've been on a bit of an Akira resurgance in case you hadn't noticed. I also managed to track down a few of the trades that Dark Horse released. I actually had purchased them all but 3 copies got lunched en route to my door step(or rather weren't adequately described by the sellers...sigh...mail order) :\

Cat Shit One
One of my older favorite manga is a book called Cat Shit One. I just discovered that the creator,
Motofumi Kobayashi,
has been at it again and released Cat Shit One '08. I also discovered that a mini-series is being produced roughly based on this work and will hit in winter 09.

More to come.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Research

Saw Watchmen last week. Bought the soundtrack on Monday. Loved it. One thing I never really grasped before, was that it's not a hero movie in the traditional sense. It's a group of vigilantes and one super human. The whole office went and enjoyed it. We spent at least 3 hours talking about it post-theater and on Monday we added that and Dark Knight Returns to the company library :-D

After watching Akira on Blu-Ray I've decided to go back and re-read the manga again. I have the entire run that was done by Marvel Comics subsidiary Epic from way back in the day as well as one of the hardcover reissues by Graffiti. I've heard recently that I should check out the Dark Horse versions as the translations are better, but alas they are long out of print. Akira was the first book I read that spanned more than 5-10 issues and held my attention the entire time. The detail with which Otomo rendered the world of 2019 Neo-Tokyo is still unrivaled IMHO. It's also the standard against which I judge my own work. On a side note,
in a spirit of the moment otaku product sweep, I lucked into a cherry copy of Akira Mechanix 2019. I am eagerly awaiting my copy in the mail.

I just finished the book "One Soldier's War in Chechnya" by Arkady Babchenko. This the tail end of a research project I did on Chechnya which included a lot of ugly ugly stuff. I read pieces from every angle, strategic, humanitarian, separatist, federalist, etc. Working on BPRE I've really been educated up on my Central Asia/Middle East history. I'll post more of my reading lists here shortly for those who are interested. I read quite a lot ^_^;

After creating drafts of 4 maps for BPRE I'm switching gears and doing a pass on the RoninSVC social network portion of BPRE this week. Over the past few months Phil spent a significant portion of his time researching and studying games on Facebook and MySpace where we learned a whole lot about what works and what doesn't in social network gaming. While it's not a 1:1 analogue, we've made a few additions and a extractions that streamline the user experience.
Go Go Echelon Software ^_^;

On another note, after spending some time tearing draft 1 to pieces I'm going to Fayetteville to start draft 2 on the screenplay for the graphic novel next week. Have a better one.